mystery & detective stories -...
TRANSCRIPT
Mystery & Detective Stories
Tropes, Terms, and Strategies
Great Mouse Detective: Setting, Atmosphere
• Fog, gaslight, Victorian settings
• Costumes: deerstalker, bowler hats, etc
• Disguises
• Violin, Magnifying glass
Great Mouse Detective: Basil
• Lives in 221 B Baker St
• Expert on miniscule details
• Lays out his deductions rationally
• Nemesis is a villainous professor, his intellectual equal
• Aristocratic, perhaps above the others (certainly intellectually)
• Not good with women or children
• Empire depends on his abilities
Great Mouse Detective: Dawson • Retired military, medical doctor
• Narrates the story; we see Basil through his eyes
• Flawed (low alcohol tolerance, not as smart as Basil)
• Perhaps slightly lower in class
• Old, bumbling, kind, funny
Great Mouse Detective: Other Details, Practices
• Mrs Judson (Mrs Hudson)
• “Elementary, my dear Dawson”
• Heightened sense of archetypes
What is a TROPE? • In strict literary criticism, it’s a figure of speech
(e.g. a metaphor, a simile, a synecdoche, etc.)
• In narrative theory it’s a convention, a short-hand, a recurrent theme or motif, a linguistic practice, something that today leads to memes: the star-crossed lovers, good cop/bad cop, the hooker with a heart of gold, “I’m a doctor, not a….”, etc.
In narrative, we have
• Early or ‘ur’ examples
• The trope maker—the first identifiable, intentional example
• The trope codifier—the example to which all later uses can be traced back in some way
So for mystery stories…
• We have examples of mysteries going as far back as the Oedipus story
• There are the ‘Newgate Calendars’ of the late 18th century
• There are newspaper accounts of crimes…
– These are the ‘Ur’ examples of mystery/detective fiction
Then we get to the 1840s… • And Poe creates C. Auguste Dupín. Poe is the
Trope Maker for detective fiction. – Modeled on actual French Prefect of Police
– Uses some of the methods of England’s new Civil Police (1829) and Detective Bureau
– Emphasizes ratiocination—the systematic application of rational thought to solving a problem or answering a question
– Possesses cultural prejudices against the police and “authorized” detectives
Poe’s Tropes: Storytelling Strategies • Narrator takes subject
part of the way and then Dupin explains
• Audience realizes things when friend does—not geniuses
• Gives the witnesses’ accounts, including bits about the languages
• Red herrings
• Chekov’s gun
• Occam’s razor
• Audience must have known languages, classics, untranslated
Poe’s Tropes: The Detective • Not cruel to police or to his friend but sees
himself as smarter than they are • Finds clues nobody else finds (and conceals them) • Notices things about shutters, hair no one else
notices (we don’t participate in that) • Story told through dialogue between Dupin and
friend, not big passages of description • Nonchalance about the solution—no hurry • Imagination and “thinking outside the box” in his
solutions
Poe’s Tropes: The Companion • Written in such a way that he has the
opportunity to see the clues, step by step
• Got many different witnesses & perspectives
• Not as smart as the detective
• Not as distrusting of the police
Poe’s Tropes: Other Practices, Details
• Takes reward from the cop
• Ruffling the feathers of the police
• Information & satisfaction about solving the case
• Locked Room
• Procedural feel
• Adversary who is smart and imaginative
• Scientific passages (about analysis, about mathematics, etc.)
Murders in the Rue Morgue
• http://tarakaye.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/methodology/
The Purloined Letter
After Poe, we get
• Many more Victorian imitations (British, American, continental)
• Spin-offs in Sensational Fiction (Wilkie Collins, East Lynne)
• Serialized novels in popular magazines
• Glamorized criminals (Oliver Twist…)
And then in 1887, we get the TROPE CODIFIER
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invents Sherlock Holmes and Captain John H. Watson, M.D.
• Immediate success, heavily imitated, huge audience reaction
What are some of the tropes Doyle establishes?
• The Great Detective
• The Watson (the domestic commentator)
• The Gaslight Setting
• The Evil Counterpart – The slightly less-competent Evil Henchman/men
• The Science of Deduction (clues, reference books, scientific method)
• The ‘Sherlock Scan’: http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70174779&trkid=7882979 @ 24 minutes
For Wednesday • Read the four stories:
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/engl200/Sherlock/CalendarM13.html
• Concentrate on identifying tropes (both those we’ve named and new ones)
• Concentrate on plot, structure, & description: what are Doyle’s narrative strategies? Mark passages to share in class.